It’s time for another themed blog post – Fabulous Friday! On Fridays, I’ll write posts relating to fashion, makeup, media, or even entertainment news/culture. Sounds too fun, right? Here’s the catch! It will always relate to advertising or branding in some way. Even more fun!

My current mascara – more on that later!

Today’s Fabulous Friday topic? Eyelashes, of course. Ladies, you know you’re guilty of picking up the slightly fancier-looking mascara that claims to make your lashes 10 TIMES LONGER, FULLER, MORE ATTRACTIVE. I know I’m definitely guilty of it!

After going out and buying the mascara that will turn your life around, do you ever feel slightly disappointed when your lashes don’t look 23 TIMES LONGER (or was it just 10?) than before? In many eye makeup commercials, I think it’s obvious that the models have on false lashes. So it will make my false eyelashes 10 times longer, right? I don’t have a huge problem with models wearing false eyelashes, but how much is too much?

The Advertising Standards Authority is no stranger to ethics and rules of advertising beauty products. Competing companies L’Oreal and Dior are bickering about a new print ad from Dior featuring Natalie Portman. L’Oreal complained to ASA that Natalie Portman’s eyelashes appeared far longer than what would be possible with makeup. Dior admitted to digitally enhancing her lashes, resulting in the ASA having Dior pull the ad.

While the ASA ruled in favor of L’Oreal this time around, L’Oreal has had it’s fair share of answering to the ASA in the past.

After looking at the Natalie Portman image, I was curious to see what L’Oreal’s current mascara ads looked like. When I found this on the main page of the makeup section of their site, I was a little amused.

The image for their new Voluminous mascara appears to be extremely edited. The model must have also been wearing some kind of false eyelashes in the image as well. I’m not sure how L’Oreal can pounce on Dior when they’re releasing images like this. Natalie Portman’s eyelashes at least look like a normal thickness, even if the length is a little extreme.

When I visited New York in May to tour ad agencies, one agency took us into their production lab and showed us all the editing that goes into many makeup print ads. It was fascinating to see! Adding and taking away hairs, changing eye shapes – everything! While they were showing us, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Dove’s Evolution of Beauty commercial.

Since Maybelline is my favorite mascara brand, I decided to take a peek around their site as well. I was pleasantly surprised to find behind the scene videos of their commercial shoots! Up close and personal with the models, you can see what they looked like before any sort of editing was done. Nothing like this was presented on the sleek Dior and L’Oreal sites. Providing videos like this makes the brand feel a bit more personable.

Makeup and beauty brands have a tough decision to make when it comes to deciding how much editing is too much. You don’t want to be lying to your consumers, but you want the models to appear as beautiful as possible! As far as mascara goes, I don’t have a problem with models wearing false eyelashes in ads. I’d of course prefer it if they didn’t, since it hides whatever the product actually does to real eyelashes. But at least you know that you could achieve a similar look if you wore false eyelashes as well. You can’t really achieve digitally enhanced eyelashes as easily.